And in a measure this impulse to flight can be understood. I can understand that common-sense men should be cold toward the Caucasian God, and that they should even renounce and denounce him. I will go so far as to say that I can more easily understand the atheist than I can many of my own friends who pathetically try to love and adore their capricious un-Christlike Deity. To my certain knowledge many of them are doing it against their own natural and better instincts, because they dare not forsake the tradition in which they have been dyed. "I try to love God and I can't," has been said to me many a time by conscientious people who felt that the fault must lie in themselves. There was no fault in themselves. If their God could have been loved they would have loved him. VII I come here to a point of no small importance to the conquest of fear, the courage to release oneself from the tether of tradition. Few people have it, in the sense of rejecting old theories because of having worked out to new spiritual knowledge. When it comes to the eternal verities many of us are cowardly; nearly all of us are timid. The immense majority of us prefer a God at second or third hand. We will accept what somebody else has learned, rather than incur the trouble or the responsibility of learning anything for ourselves. We take our knowledge of God as we take our doses of medicine, from a prescription which one man has written down, and another has "put up," and still another administers. By the time this traditional, handed-on knowledge of God has reached ourselves it is diluted by all kinds of outside opinions and personalities. It is not strange that when we have swallowed the dose it does little to effect a cure. I do not deny that a second or third hand knowledge of God may do something. I only deny that it can do much. To support my denial I need only point to what the world has become in a second and third hand Christendom. The illustration is enough. It should be plain, I think, that no one will ever be released from fear by clinging to the teachings which have inspired fear. We are fearless in proportion as we grow independent enough to know for ourselves. I cannot but stress this point to some extent, for the reason that I myself suffered so long from inability to let the traditional go. It seemed to me to have a sanctity just because it was traditional. The fact that other people had accepted certain ideas had weight in making me feel that I should accept them too. To go off on a line of my own seemed dangerous. I might make mistakes. I might go far wrong. Safety was spelled by hanging with the crowd.